Tag Archives: World Challenge

I’ve been researching the possibility of participating in a new endurance race for a few years now: the South African 9 hour. And with recent news of SRO adding a round in Africa to their Intercontinental GT Challenge, this may actually happen for me.

Like most other events SRO hitch their wagon to an established event, and the South African 9 hour has been run for years. While it’s not huge in it’s current form there is some variety like CN prototypes among GT3 field and other support classes. Kind of like the Gulf 12 hour in Abu Dhabi but more locally focussed. The California 8 hour was small too last year. But it was fairly exciting. News of Kyalami being bought and refurbished last year sort of hinted at bigger and better things to come. And this is pretty awesome.

While there’s no guarantees anything will actually materialize, it certainly gives me something to look forward to and plan out. The race won’t be until the end of the 2019 racing season, early November. Plenty of time to save up money with my new job, and request the time off I would need for the 16 hour flight from NYC to Johannesburg. Sign up for some rewards cards to optimize my hotel and airline redemptions. Research the MX5 Miata community to organize a meet. And maybe even plan a side trip to Madagascar or the Seychelles. Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

But for now I’m excited to see what pans out from this. I have participated in most SRO Intercontinental GT Challenge events, Spa 24 hours a few times. Bathurst 12 hours, Sepang 12 hour, California 8 hour at Laguna Seca… Suzuka has rejected me for my first event in Japan but I’m hopeful the South Africans would be more welcoming.

Thanks to the powers that be this season, I got an opportunity to work four different PWC events so far. And as luck would have it each one of those races I performed a different role as a marshal. That is a massive accomplishment personally in my book. (Log Book if we were doing those things here)

Race 1: St. Petersburg Grand Prix in Florida: Pit Marshal

PWC ran as a support race to IndyCar… and I was there in pit lane.

Race 2: Grand Prix of VIRginia International Raceway (Fire Rescue)

PWC was the headlining event at VIR and I got a chance to ride in the fire truck and tow truck over the 3 day weekend, hooking cars and picking up debris on the hot track!

Race 3: Victoria Day Speedfest at Mosport (Blue Flag Marshal)

PWC sort of competed for the headline event at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park sharing the spotlight with local Pinty’s NASCAR series… I think most people went there for PWC but definitely stock cars brings it’s die fans too. I was there flagging over the weekend.

Race 4: Grand Prix of Lime Rock Park (Backup Starter)

The most recent PWC experience at Lime Rock Park over Memorial Day weekend was a cherry on top moment for me working as a Backup Starter to the series Starters. Ahhmazing!

This really is an awesome time for me in my Motorsport volunteering career. If I were to stop marshaling now I’d feel that I’ve done everything I wanted to do with this hobby!

Of course, as many would say and as I totally firmly believe myself: “The Best is yet to come….”

To say I had a blast at this weekend’s (Memorial Day weekend) PWC event at LRP would be an understatement… I really, truly, genuinely had an amazing time. And the people I got a chance to work with totally contributed to that experience.

It absolutely makes a difference who you work with and this time I was super lucky. You know someone else is comfortable with you when she refers to you as “dipshit” to her colleague. That happened. Both of my series starters from PWC were amazing, and it was my honor to be working with them as a backup starter at the Start/Finish stand.

I thought the weekend went especially well. The racing was better than usual. We didn’t have too many bullshit crashes that tend to ruin other PWC events. The recoveries were smooth and quick, and there were awesome battles for positions throughout the field in all the classes. That was awesome.

I got to make a lot of calls on the radio. Which was good. I’m happy I didn’t make too many mistakes with that aspect. I was even able to do a debris run picking up a large chunk of debris from the race winning Turner BMW in the TC race. But I also made some rookie mistakes and they were to be blamed on me squarely. There were three instances where I was meant to point out a car to the series starters and I pointed out the wrong car. We did track it correctly, but for whatever reason I pointed at a different car that was similar in appearance. In the TCA/TCB race I pointed to the SAC racing 080 car instead of the race winning 70 car. Both were black with Green accents, but one was Teal and another bright Green… One was ND and another NC. And yet somehow I mucked it up. With the other starter I had real trouble with the Porsche Cayman GT4’s… we were supposed to track 018 car and I (for some weird reason) confused it with it’s sister car 017… luckily the series starter was better than me at identifying cars but it tripped her up too, unnecessarily. Maybe the dipshit comment was right on the money.

I must have not been too terrible, because unlike the series starter last year she greeted me with a hug in the morning, which was an AWWWW moment. She must not hate me. And on race day she gave me a little gift, a pin of a Guardian Angel that one of her colleagues designed. AWWWW again! She doesn’t want me to die. That’s nice. I really enjoyed the weekend and I really hope I get another opportunity to work with these folks again… somewhere!

Pirelli World Challenge was a standalone feature of this Memorial Day weekend. So we only had the GT/GTA/GT Cup, GTS and TC/TCA/TCB cars at the track. What was different was the fact that the field of TC cars grew so large in size that they got to run a race on their own without the usual TCA/TCB addition. This meant that the TCA/TCB ran a race of their own too… and it was clear as day to see how well the Global MX-5 Cup cars performed on their own in this series. I knew they won at VIR and Mosport (both races I volunteered) but since there was a different overall winner in TC class, it wasn’t so obvious who won TCA. The older Miata’s in TC class though qualified super well, they were in row 2 and 3 on the grid, but as soon as the race started they faltered. Many DNF’d. Which sucks! But the cars are getting old, and the newest addition to the field this year, the BMW 235M blew up in size, it seems like they are completely dominating this series. In the GT race there were quite a few incidences, but overall it was super enjoyable to watch and especially neat to be a part of in such an amazing position on the start stand. I’m incredibly grateful!

Best of all I didn’t have to choose between having lunch or taking pictures during our downtime. I was smack in the middle of all the action. I could just walk over to the dummy grid and take a few snaps before heading back on duty and the series starters were happy to help me out with a few selfie style shots to capture the moment of this experience. It was tremendous!

Fantastic Memorial Day weekend at the races… Lime Rock Park was fantastic to me. I have grown to absolutely love the Pirelli World Challenge series. And best part I got to work as a backup starter… so there was a lot of downtime. I was in the prime spot to see the cars up close, and as a result there was ample opportunity to take some pix. So this is my Saturday Race Day mega gallery… enough talking here’s the pix:

Free breakfast for the marshals how thoughtful! Thanks Skip Barber

Miata Racing is the main reason I signed up to do this event!

They split TC from TCA/TCB races, so it was much easier to see the current MX-5 Cup cars winning a race…

New flavor of SAC racing skittles cars…

Hhhmm… I didn’t know Volvo and GM had a relationship… I knew about SAAB/Scania but Volvo GM – WHITEGMC is news to me… kind of cool though!

This is such a beautiful and completely appropriate paint job… for this event!

Selfies!

The driver of this #70 also raced (and won in) the TCA MX-5 Cup car

Thanks to Chris Booth for taking some pix of me with the cars in the paddock during lunch time.

He sells Miata parts apparently 🙂

…after doing donuts in Turn 1 and returning to pit lane counter race

The series starter gave me a small gift: A Guardian Angel… Awwww!

I am so grateful to everyone that made this weekend possible for me. Thanks to the folks at Lime Rock Park, to the series: Pirelli World Challenge and of course Chris Booth for taking some pix for me. Thank you all very much! See you at the next one.

This is my first time since last year working as a back-up starer for a pro event (or for any event period) and it just so happens that last year it was PWC at LRP as well.

Despite the wet weather and the alternating mist and light rain, the racing has been especially good. Only the PWC series are present though they are broken up in bits to make more racing happen. There’s the Sprint X headliner featuring GT (Pro-Pro), GTA (Pro-Am), GT Cup (Am-Am) and GTS (up and coming Pro’s)… the TC group grew so big with all the new BMW 235M’s that they get to race on their own… I think I counted over 30 cars, and it’s especially nice to see the familiar yellow Turner cars #95 & #96 re-join the series. TCA and TCB round out the support races with a pretty large field as well. Really neat to see this racing up close from the Starter stand. I love it! Didn’t take many pix, but the few I did I’d like to share:

And so my day went absolutely perfectly… I truly enjoy working Start and my PWC series colleagues were awesome to me. Despite the rain I thought the racing was very good. No stupid crashes. It was very competitive, very tight and mostly clean with minor incidents here and there (only a few full course cautions)… so I’m grateful for that. Lime Rock Park fed us at the end of the day and I was happy to spy a bunch of Mazda’s at the track including a Miata parade early in the morning and a few Mazdaspeed 3’s and 6’s in the camping area.

I decided not to tent it in the wet, and instead opted for the 2 hour and 100 mile trek home… which was fine in the evening, but I’m sure tomorrow morning I’ll be regretting it. Oh well… looking forward to another great day at the track!

All of these cars you have already seen before on this blog… a few weeks ago at VIR, but now Canadian Tire Motorsports Park is in the background and since I left home at the crack of dawn to make sure I can’t them on the track for their Thursday test session, I’m going to share the pix separately from the general Paddock post card I wrote about in another blog post… so here it goes, lots and lots of Miata pix

Only a handful of teams ran the MX-5 cup car in the Pirelli World Challenge TC and TCA class. The TC cars of the past were NC Miata’s running a 2.5L engine and a big wing, which didn’t come standard on the car. The TCA class ran a standard 2.0L and a Mazdaspeed lip spoiler which carried over from the Playboy MX-5 Cup of the past. The cars literally came from Playboy Miata Cup once NC cars were phased out for ND Miatas. Now this year is a transition year as ND MX-5 Cup cars are eligible to run PWC. Unlike last week at VIRginia International Raceway, all the cars had their hard tops in place, and some teams like SAC above even wrapped them to match the livery. The SAC example above is especially interesting as they did the same thing at VIR, running both the NC and ND #74 car with identical liveries, transferring their knowledge gathered from data from one car to the other. Very cool!

The best part about arriving to a race track on Thursday is your ability to see all the teams unload, unpack and participate in the unofficial test day… which means you can take lots of pictures!

I certainly did just that!

My favorite were the PWC cars of course, but also the Canadian CTCC touring cars… especially stuff we don’t get in the US like the Euro-Spec Honda Civic Type R… enjoy the pix:

The field of Porsche’s was significantly smaller than I remember it from previous years. There was also a majority of Platinum class cars, with only a handful of Gold class… but the racing was relatively clean with minimal incidents.

Many of these GT3 Cup Canada cars also run in the US version of the GT3 Cup North America, and they are extremely competitive winning some of the races I’ve been to at Watkins Glen and Sebring.

The GT3 Cup series sponsor Petro-Canada Ultra 94 has an interesting story. It was a Sunoco branded fuel until Petro-Canada took over keeping the Ultra 94 top tier which in the US was discontinued and reverted back to Ultra 93 (some claims were made that were not met). I use Ultra 94 in my Miata while in Canada (along with Ultra 93 from Sunoco in the US) and can’t complain about it’s performance at all. Good fuel!

The new Bimmer 235M completely dominate the TC class in PWC

Team M&S started out with this Canadian-spec Civic Si but switched to the Euro-spec Civic Type R for the final day of the weekend (running number 66)

And there’s the Euro-spec Civic Type R run by a team of brothers that run different flags of convenience… some race with a Canadian flag on the side window, others with the flag of Hong Kong

A bit sad with this feature PWC series. Ever since Sprint X was introduced they reduced running the normal GT class stand alone. And with the weather on Sunday at Mosport the race was cancelled.

It’s only the coolest race series in North America at present… so cool they are almost guaranteed to roll while crashing into your station, and I had two of them launch my way spraying the whole team with debris and a cloud of dust.

In many ways this series reminds me of the very similarly arranged Suzuki Swift Cup in New Zealand. It was extremely popular and good fun to watch because those cars, very similarly, had a tendency to roll whenever something happened. They were built like tanks, bounced off each other and various barriers around the track, and buzzed along to slow but hard earned victory. The Micra is a similar beast and for me that was basically the feature race of the weekend.

I was a little surprised to learn that they no longer sell Micra’s in the US… but the model racing in Canada, as new as it looks is actually at least three years old… that was the 2014 fourth generation model according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Micra

The field started out with around 30 cars on Thursday, when I arrived at the track to register for the event and take some pictures… but the time the weekend progressed a significant amount of cars dropped off the list. With many of them being written off completely. There were several roll overs each day. The two that hit us at Station 9 on Saturday were especially crazy! But I’ll wait for the video of the incident to come out in a couple of months to share the story…. hopefully there is some good footage of what happened.

For now here’s some pix from the paddock:

According to the locals this is a very French Canadian endeavor with most of the teams and drivers coming from Quebec (many of the races take place in the French speaking province since they have so many circuits)… there’s of course the Nissan-Renault tie up, and similar series exist in Europe like the Renault Clio Cup (off the top of my head)…

I thoroughly enjoyed this event. Despite getting way too close for comfort with a couple of out of control cars.

Can’t wait to do another one… maybe at Circuit Mont-Tremblant, QC or Circuit Trois-Rivières, QC

I want to express my gratitude to the men and women I worked with over the past three consecutive Florida races, two of them back-to-back and especially our Chief of Pit & Grid Marshals Scott Lucas. Thank you sir!

What an incredible opportunity this has been. It’s definitely a first in my seven years of marshaling that I found a team that welcomed me as well as these folks. I am so grateful!

Needless to say I would love to be back and work with them again, and I hope they will extend more opportunities to me in the future.

Posts navigation

Welcome to Grand Prix Road Trip

This blog chronicles the adventures of an American Motorsport marshal around the world. Want to volunteer yourself? Click on each country flag for more information on how to get started, or check out the info by series and circuits from the menu on the left. Marshal Cam is a video channel that promotes volunteering in Motorsport, give it a whirl and get a free patch for your participation.
The Miata hobby was borne of Motorsport but took on a life of it's own. Follow Russ on his MX-5 Road Trips around the world meeting owners everywhere he goes.
To get in touch with Russ be sure to make contact through facebook, twitter or leave a comment on any of the blog posts.